Mandriva Kiosk Lite open for beta testing

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We're happy to announce that from today, the new software installation service Mandriva Kiosk Lite (featuring KDE 3.5 and Mozilla Firefox / Thunderbird 1.5) is open for beta testing. All Silver and above (inc. VIP) Club members are invited to participate. If you wish to help us test Mandriva Kiosk Lite, please read the following instructions that will inform you on the procedures. If you just can't wait, start from Mandriva Linux 2006 Official or Mandriva One 2006, download and install all the available updated packages here, then visit http://start2.mandriva.com to test Mandriva Kiosk Lite.

First of all, a brief introduction to Mandriva Kiosk and Mandriva Kiosk Lite:

Mandriva Kiosk is a web-based one-click software installation service. Designed to be the easiest way to expand a Mandriva Linux distribution, it provides fully-functional software bundles that users can browse, choose and install from the Web. Bundles are in fact a selection of software packages, bundled and tested by the Mandriva team, that form a single application or a natural group of applications. Kiosk will be available free to Club Members (Silver and above), and as a subscription service. Pricing details are yet to be announced.

Mandriva Kiosk Lite is the first milestone on the road to Mandriva Kiosk v1. Available to Mandriva Club members (Silver and above), it'll offer the latest versions of popular software. We're hoping to launch the Lite service officially in the near future, and incrementally implement new functions until we reach v1 (no estimated date for now). New bundles are on the way, and we're open to suggestions!

Currently, Mandriva Kiosk Lite supports only the i586 versions of Mandriva Linux 2006 Official and Mandriva One 2006. There is not yet support for the x86-64 architecture, or Mandriva Linux 2006 Community (including the Club Christmas edition). However, support for both x86-64 and Community is planned for the near future. If you want to help test Kiosk on Community, you can edit your /etc/mandriva-release file to read 'Official' instead of 'Community', but please note that this has not yet been extensively tested, and you should specify that you are using Community when filing any bug reports.

Known bugs

Currently, after installing the KDE 3.5 bundle, if you try to log out, KDM will crash, taking X down with it. You can either log out then restart X from a console, if you know how, or simply reboot after installing the bundle. We're looking at a way to fix this, but it's not straightforward.

There is a known problem with kdevelop: if you try and install the KDE 3.5 bundle with kdevelop installed, it will fail completely. So if you have kdevelop installed and you wish to test the KDE 3.5 bundle, please remove it first.

How to test Mandriva Kiosk Lite: Requirements

• Latest version of URPMI, MDKONLINE, RPMDRAKE and GURPMI, available here - this is important! Without these packages you will encounter many bugs, or Kiosk will not work at all. When Kiosk Lite is publicly released, these packages will be released as official updates, but for now you must install them manually.
• Internet connection (broadband is a plus)
• Valid Silver, VIP or above Mandriva Club membership
• Mandriva Linux 2006 Official and/or Mandriva One 2006
• Mozilla Firefox (versions 1.0.6 and above) or Konqueror (versions 3.4.2 and above) (Opera is not yet supported)

Access Mandriva Kiosk Lite

• Go to http://start2.mandriva.com. You should have enough visible help there to get you through. If anything about the process is unclear, let us know.
• Download the bundles you want
• 4 bundles are available at present: KDE 3.5, GNOME 2.12, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird 1.5

Test procedures

Before EACH test, please check that you have the latest version of all packages available here

• Test the installation procedure in priority, try to install bundles on a blank 2006 if available, or a manually updated 2006, or a Mandriva One. We want Kiosk to work with as many package configurations as possible, so please report any conflicts or problems that arise with any official Mandriva packages. We cannot guarantee that Kiosk will work if you have installed third party packages (e.g. MDE, SoS), however.
• Try to install them twice, try to stop your internet connection in the middle of a download, and try to relaunch the installation afterwards to see if the program manages to resume correctly.
• If you have access to a low bandwidth line, try an installation with it too, it will be long, but it should succeed.
• Check that the languages you asked for is the one correctly installed. If you installed KDE or GNOME, be sure that your user settings are still configured.
• The bundle installation should be straightforward, please report any error message or question you see during the installation procedure. Check particularly that you do not have a message asking you to choose between packages A and B to fulfil one of the dependencies. Once you have clicked on the bundle, you should see a browser message asking you what to do, then you will enter your root password, and that should be it up to the last 'Installation completed' message.

How to report and give feedback

BUGS: report all bugs to this page on Bugzilla.

The following URL will produce a search of all existing Kiosk bugs, so you can check you are not filing a duplicate: http://makeashorterlink.com/?V11B243FC

Questions, Suggestions, Improvements, etc: Post to the Mandriva Software or Community Chat Club forum. Please mention Kiosk somewhere in the topic name. Of course, you can always post a comment on this post, too.

References: Please also refer to the following pages:

http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/KB/MandrivaKioskLiteBetaFAQ
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/QaContributorsCorner
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrivaKiosk
http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/TestScenario

Ready? Start testing! http://start2.mandriva.com

Happy testing - Mandriva Kiosk Team.